The proper role of skeptical organizations

It seems to me that CSICOP and other skeptical groups have set for
themselves two tasks regarding paranormal and fringe science
claims. The name of CSICOP's journal, the Skeptical Inquirer,
itself suggests this division: being skeptical about paranormal
claims, and inquiring into their validity. (Paul Kurtz's
introductory address to the 1992 CSICOP conference in Dallas made
the point that perhaps in the past too much emphasis has been
placed on the skeptical part without enough on the inquiring part.
He also stated that his new book, The New Skepticism, argues for
a constructive rather than merely negative skepticism.)

It also appears to me that in addition to these two tasks,
there is a natural division of subject matter. Paranormal and
fringe science claims are either crazy and absurd or more serious.
I'm not going to suggest a criterion for distinguishing these two
broad categories, because they are to some degree subjective and
relative to one's background beliefs. In general, though, more
serious claims have (at least apparently) good evidence offered in
support of them. I would suggest that for the purposes of
organized skeptical groups, the line be drawn so that borderline
cases fall onto the serious claims side.

Failure to make these (and other) distinctions can lead to
some serious problems. If the spokespersons for organized
skeptical groups make statements without giving thought to these
distinctions, they are likely to say things which will result in
harsh (and deserved) criticism.

As I see them, the two roles of organized skepticism--being
skeptical and inquiring--can be elaborated as follows:

Being Skeptical: Traditionally, being skeptical means to
withhold judgment in the absence of evidence. To members of
organized skeptical groups, however, it usually means to reject
claims in the absence of evidence. This distinction between
withholding judgment and rejection--between nonbelief and
disbelief--might seem to be of little practical significance.
Whether I lack a belief in the efficacy of paranormal abilities or
disbelieve in paranormal abilities, I am going to act as if they
don't exist. With both nonbelief and disbelief, there is some
threshold of evidence that has to be overcome in order to generate
belief. Perhaps in the case of disbelief the threshold is higher.
But I believe the distinction does make a difference with respect
to more serious paranormal claims.

That organized skeptical groups emphasize disbelief can be
seen from the fact that they emphasize disproof of paranormal and
fringe science claims. There are three types of responses which
skeptics make to claims: (a) asking for evidence (any, when none
has been offered; more, when some has been offered); (b) offering
a refutation of the evidence offered; and (c) offering a
reasonable alternative explanation which does not appeal to the
paranormal or supernatural. Response (a) is the most clearly
compatible with both nonbelief and disbelief. "Extraordinary
claims require extraordinary proof" suggests that one should not
assent to claims without the appropriate degree of evidence, but
it doesn't say whether one should withhold judgment or disbelieve
in the meantime. Response (b) is also compatible with both
nonbelief and disbelief, but is usually taken as an argument for
disbelief. Response (c), by explicitly offering an alternative,
is an argument for disbelief.

Frequently overlooked is that both responses (b) and (c)
themselves involve the making of claims, and thus require
evidential support in order to be reasonably believed. Further,
more evidence is required to support a case for disbelief than a
case for nonbelief, and more evidence is required to support a
case against a more serious paranormal claim than a crazy and
absurd one. (It can be reasonably argued that the degree of
evidential support required for a non-paranormal explanation is
less than that required for a paranormal explanation, but it is
difficult to see how an objective assessment of the requisite
balance could be made. What should not be in question, though, is
that at least some evidence is required, contrary to the view
espoused by CSICOP Fellow C.E.M. Hansel. Hansel has argued that
simply coming up with a possible (no matter how implausible) non-
paranormal explanation for positive results in a parapsychology
experiment is sufficient to show that the paranormal explanation
is incorrect (or should not be believed). I don't believe
Hansel's view carries much weight in CSICOP. CSICOP Executive
Council member Ray Hyman has explicitly argued against this aspect
of Hansel's parapsychology critiques in the pages of the
Skeptical Inquirer.)

Inquiring: This involves the serious investigation (and
promotion of serious investigation) of anomalies, and is a
necessary precondition for responses (b) and (c) to more serious
paranormal claims. CSICOP got off to a bad start with respect to
this task with the Gauquelin "Mars effect" claims, and has since
declared that it no longer officially sponsors any research.
Instead, research is simply done by others and published in the
Skeptical Inquirer. This is probably the right way to run
things, though perhaps CSICOP should consider funding some
research. (That's assuming that its financial and legal situation
improves.)

CSICOP should assume, I think, that Skeptical Inquirer
readers have some interest in the substance of paranormal claims
and seeing them carefully examined. It should not assume that
readers only want to hear about the claims that have been or can
be debunked. It seems to me that the claims that no one has been
able to successfully debunk are the most interesting and are
potentially of the greatest consequence. While the book reviews,
"Articles of Note" column, and "News and Comment" columns in the
Skeptical Inquirer do occasionally present information on
as-yet-undebunked claims, the emphasis is strongly on the more absurd
claims. I suggest that this emphasis may be misplaced. The
publication of Suitbert Ertel's "Update on the 'Mars Effect'" in
the Winter 1992 Skeptical Inquirer is, in my opinion, a step in
the right direction.

Given these distinctions between skepticism and inquiring and
between absurd and serious claims, there are four categories of
actions which can be evaluated. I here offer my evaluation of
CSICOP:

Being Skeptical: Absurd claims. This is an effort which is both
much-needed (since there is so much popular nonsense) and which
CSICOP does quite well, in my opinion. CSICOP spokespersons are
frequently quoted in newspapers, and the circulation of the
Skeptical Inquirer has been built up from about a thousand to
over thirty thousand. Local skeptical groups have been started in
most states and many countries, and a large part of what they do
is combat credulous portrayals of paranormal and fringe science
claims in the media.

Being Skeptical: Serious claims. Here CSICOP does less well,
simply because it gives more serious claims less coverage. It is
not clear that CSICOP is even very interested in more serious
claims, but perhaps would rather leave them to the scientific
community to evaluate. While I would agree that the scientific
community should perform the ultimate evaluation of serious
claims, I would like to see CSICOP give a forum to such claims and
criticisms of them--which would either help the claims be
recognized as something worthy of investigation by the scientific
community or as something not worthy of such investigation. (This
pictures CSICOP as a sort of a way-station on the road to
recognition by the scientific community. The critic of CSICOP
would call this making CSICOP a "gate-keeper" of scientific
orthodoxy, but that supposes that going through CSICOP is the
*only* road to scientific respectability. It isn't--the Society of
Scientific Exploration plays this role, and at present does so
better than CSICOP. The SSE's disadvantage is that it plays to a
much smaller audience.)

Inquiring: Absurd claims. Because of their absurdity, absurd
claims don't require much in the way of investigation. CSICOP
does a fairly good job here, except on those occasions where it
lets ridicule or sarcasm play the role of evidence. (I don't
think that there is no place for ridicule or sarcasm, but it is no
substitute for argument. I disagree with H.L. Mencken and Martin
Gardner that a horselaugh is worth a thousand syllogisms. That
may be true with respect to persuasive power, but it is not true
with respect to evidential weight.)

Inquiring: Serious claims. The articles published in the
Skeptical Inquirer are generally pretty good, I think, but on
occasion they are somewhat superficial or do not adequately
support the claims they make regarding alternative explanations.
I would suggest raising the standards for publication, improving
the refereeing process, and encouraging more internal criticism of
published alternative explanations of paranormal claims.

An argument could be made that CSICOP should dispense with serious
claims completely, and leave them to other groups such as the SSE.
If it were to do this, I would hope that it would make it clear
that that is what it is doing. Failure to do so could wrongly
lead readers to conclude that it *is* addressing the strongest
pro-paranormal claims that exist. I don't think that it should
ignore serious claims, however. The Skeptical Inquirer should
not be turned into a more academic journal, but I think serious
paranormal claims deserve more popular coverage like the
Skeptical Inquirer can offer. (The Skeptical Inquirer is
presently more-or-less the skeptical counterpart of Fate
magazine; I'd like to see it also be sort of a Discover for more
serious paranormal claims which are discussed in a more technical
manner elsewhere.)

I said at the very beginning that the failure to draw these
distinctions can lead to problems. The failure to distinguish
absurd from serious claims leads to the equation of
parapsychologists and fortune tellers, e.g., to make statements
which imply that the claims made for ESP in the Journal of
Parapsychology are no better than those made in the Weekly World
News. Failure to distinguish being skeptical from inquiry
(ignoring the inquiry part) leads to an emphasis on debunking and
to ignoring what evidence proponents of paranormal claims have
actually put forth. (Such evidence may be rejected out of hand
for being too weak to establish some strong claim, even though it
may establish that something anomalous is occurring for which some
explanation needs to be provided.) Failure to distinguish
nonbelief from disbelief leads to erroneous statements about
burden of proof in cases where the skeptic has put forth an
alternative explanation without sufficient evidence. Other
erroneous or implausible positions skeptics can be led into by
failure to draw these distinctions are that there are no genuine
anomalies, that all genuine anomalies that do exist can be
explained in terms of conventional science (i.e., without the
development of any new theories), or that CSICOP is the ultimate
arbiter of what is true and false in the realm of paranormal and
fringe science claims. That is a role that I think no
organization or group of individuals can legitimately take.

> Being Skeptical: Absurd claims. This is an effort which is both
> much-needed (since there is so much popular nonsense) and which
> CSICOP does quite well, in my opinion. CSICOP spokespersons are
> frequently quoted in newspapers, and the circulation of the
> Skeptical Inquirer has been built up from about a thousand to
> over thirty thousand. Local skeptical groups have been started in
> most states and many countries, and a large part of what they do
> is combat credulous portrayals of paranormal and fringe science
> claims in the media.

All I'd like to emphasize here is that this is, to me, the most
important part of CSICOP. This is the political function. This
is why I give money to support the organization. Before CSICOP (not
too long ago), when a paranormal claim was reported in the newspaper
there was no evidence whatsoever that anyone anyplace might have any
doubts that the claim was absolute truth. With CSICOP and the local
organizations, there is frequently at least a small paragraph with a
quote from some skeptic. The net result is that someone who wonders
about the claim, someone who isn't quite sure of its veracity, can see
that perhaps he or she is not alone. There *is* another side.

When I read polls of how many non-scientific beliefs are held by
the general public, and how that fact might influence our schools and
what is taught to our children, I began to get worried. Do we really
want creationism taught in school? I feel the political part of
skepticism helps, in a small way, balance the mis-information rampant
in the world.

IN ADDITION, I like discussion about what the boundries of science are,
what is right and wrong with the (small amount of) good research in
the paranormal, etc. But this is of interest to a very few people
(comparatively), many of whom are in this group. I like the fun of
intellectual discussion and argument; I think Truzzi's "Zetic Scholar" is
a much more balanced publication *for a few people*. But for me, the
purpose of CSICOP is much more general and more important than my own
interests. It is a political group that provides a counterbalance in
the press for absurd claims, as stated above.

In article <[email protected]>
[email protected] (James J. Lippard) writes:
> What should not be in question, though, is
> that at least some evidence is required, contrary to the view
> espoused by CSICOP Fellow C.E.M. Hansel. Hansel has argued that
> simply coming up with a possible (no matter how implausible) non-
> paranormal explanation for positive results in a parapsychology
> experiment is sufficient to show that the paranormal explanation
> is incorrect (or should not be believed).

I don't know what Hansel says.

I do know that there are a lot of claims that go along these lines:

See, here's this evidence.

There is no possibility that this could be due to anything other than
My Hypothesis.

Therefore, My Hypothesis is correct.

Showing that there exists some possibility that it could be due to
something other than M.H. is quite sufficient to reduce this argument to
noise. It really doesn't have anything to do with paranormal versus
normal or absurd versus serious. It's just a consequence of the fact that
anybody making a specific claim implicitly defines a null hypothesis which
must be ruled out.